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The Howard Journal Vol 52 No 3. July 2013
10.1111/hojo.12010
ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 272–284
Inmate Governance in Brazilian
Prisons
SACHADARKE
Senior Lecturer, University of Westminster
Abstract: Prisons in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are
run not so much by prison guards as by inmates. In
circumstances of severe overcrowding and acute
staff shortage, prisoners are recruited or organise
themselves, not only to perform clerical and
janitorial work, but also to provide for welfare,
discipline and security. Such inmate governance is as
much a defining feature of Brazilian prison life as are
inhumane living conditions. In recent years the roles
played by inmates in managing the day-to-day
running of Brazilian prisons have been largely
subsumed by prison gangs. However, staff-inmate
relations remain characterised less by conflict and
power as by accommodation and reciprocity.
DOI:Keywords: Brazil; prison life; inmate participation;
gangs
In the past few years I have visited six Brazilian
prisons in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas
Gerais. According to the most recent official prison
statistics, for June 2011 (Brazil, Ministério de Justiça
2012), these three states account for 22% (271) of
the country’s prisons and 49% (252,748) of its
prisoners. Across Brazil’s 27 states, 513,602 people
are detained in 1,237 prisons. Of these, 49,362 are
detained in police custody,1 often irregularly in police
stations or carceragems (lock-ups; units of holding
cells) rather than pre-trial jails, sometimes after
conviction or even beyond the end of their sentence.
There are 464,240 prisoners detained in state
penitentiaries, of whom 295,165 are sentenced and
169,075 are on remand, again often illegally. 2 Sixty-
eight per cent (200,645) of sentenced prisoners are
held in closed units, 24% (72,214) in semi-open
units and 6% (17,853) in open units. The remaining
4,453 sentenced prisoners are detained in secure
psychiatric hospitals. Seven per cent (36,596) of
Brazilian prisoners are women.
My first prison visit, in April 2005, was to the
infamous, but recently deactivated, Casa de
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Detenção de São Paulo (better known as Carandiru),
the largest prison in Latin America, which, in the
1990s, held 7,000 inmates (Varella 1999), over one
in ten of the state’s 59,000 sentenced prisoners,
double its official capacity of 3,250 (Salla 2007). The
main cell blocks each held 1,500 prisoners, but were
guarded by just ten to twelve officers during the day
and six to seven at night (Varella 1999). 3 Three years
later I conducted extended visits to two active
prisons, also in the state of São Paulo: Centro de
Detenção Provisória da Capital – Chácara Belém ll, a
complex containing a remand unit with an official
capacity of 768, but most recently recorded as
holding 1,657 inmates, and a semiopen unit for
sentenced prisoners, with an official capacity of 108,
but currently holding 187;4 and Penitenciária
Feminina Sant’Ana, one of Brazil’s oldest penal
establishments and now the largest women’s prison
in Latin America, with a current recorded population
of 2,609 remand and sentenced prisoners, under
10% over its official capacity of 2,400, yet holding its
prisoners two per cell originally designed for single
occupancy. I met just three guards besides the
director and head of security in the three hours that I
spent at Belém ll. In 2006, its sister complex, Belém
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l, employed just 15 officers to guard 2,000 prisoners
(Miraglia and Salla 2008).
In March 2010, I had the opportunity to visit three
more prisons: in Minas Gerais, APAC de Nova Lima,
one of over 120 non-governmental organisation
(NGO) administered community prisons or prison
units in Brazil, which was holding 85 prisoners across
closed, semi-open and open units; and in Rio de
Janeiro, Penitenciária Alfredo Trajan (Bangu ll), a
closed prison with a current population of
approximately 700, and a police lock-up (which I will
refer to as Polinter) holding 603 prisoners. The NGO
prisons of Minas Gerais are considered the most
humane in the country (Brazil, Chamber of Deputies
2008), but at Nova Lima, inmates are still kept four
per 12m2 cell. As with the majority of prisons in Rio
de Janeiro’s penitentiary system, the population of
Bangu II rarely rises above 110% capacity.
Nonetheless, similar to Sant’Ana, a minimum of two
prisoners are held per single-occupancy cell. In an
effort to control overcrowding in its state
penitentiaries, the state ministry for prisons requires
inmates to remain in police custody until spaces
become available.5 According to the June 2011
figures, currently 1,980 prisoners are detained by the

police in Rio de Janeiro. The negative effects of this
policy were apparent at Polinter, where all but around
70 of its prisoners were held across eleven
dormitories ranging 18–36m2 in size. On the day I
visited, the temperature was close to 50°C. 6 A
number of prisoners had been there since April 2010,
when occupancy levels in the larger dormitories
exceeded 100. During this period it had only been
possible to sleep sitting up, leaning against one
another. As for staffing levels, at Bangu II a prison
guard informed me that there were usually no more
than eight officers on duty. On the second day of a
hunger strike at Bangu lll, a nearby maximum-
security prison holding 780 prisoners identified as
high-risk gang leaders, ten guards were reportedly
on duty (Caldeira 2003). At Polinter, four police
officers were on duty during the day and two,
occasionally one, during the night. There was no
state presence at Nova Lima, though it employed a
plantonista (caretaker) to work at the front gate.
In September 2010, I returned to Polinter to
conduct an appreciative study of the everyday
realities of living and working in an overcrowded,
understaffed prison. I was particularly interested in
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The Howard Journal Vol 52 No 3. July 2013
ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 272–284
exploring the roles played by prisoners in running the
lock-up, and the reciprocal nature of officer-inmate
relations. With its focus on lived experience and
mutual survival, the research was conducted from a
cultural anthropological perspective. Over a three-
week period I spent 8–10 hours a day at the lock-up,
observing, informally interacting and on occasion
participating in staff and prisoner activities. During
the second and third weeks of the study, I held 20
semi-structured interviews with key informants.
Prison Overcrowding and Staff Shortage
Academic and governmental accounts of prison
conditions in Brazil invariably focus on overcrowding
and staff shortage (for example, Amnesty
International 1999; Brazil, Chamber of Deputies
2008; Human Rights Watch 1998; International Bar
Association 2010; Salla et al. 2009; United Nations
Committee Against Torture 2009; Wacquant 2008).
According to the official figures for June 2011, there
is a shortfall of 208,900 spaces, leaving the Brazilian
prison system operating at 159% capacity. In 2006,
just 61,000 people were employed in the penitentiary
system, 75% as guards (Salla et al. 2009).
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Overcrowding particularly affects those detained in
police custody, for which 12,712 spaces are recorded
(the Ministry of Justice does not collate figures on
staffing levels in police lock-ups). Further, as I
discovered in my initial prison visits, official capacity
rates and staffing levels are poor reflections of the
reality on the ground. Capacity rates are rarely
calculated on the basis of one person per cell.
Brazilian law stipulates that prisoners must be held in
single cells measuring 6m2, but with the exception of
prisoners held in solitary confinement in
maximumsecurity units at state level, or in one of
five federal supermax prisons, single occupancy is
unheard of (Human Rights Watch 1998). Moreover,
most Brazilian prisoners live in multi-occupancy
dormitories, often in spaces of under a square metre
per prisoner. Brazil, Chamber of Deputies (2008)
gives examples of such extremities of cell occupancy
across the Brazilian penal system, including a prison
in the state of Bahia with an official capacity of 1,200
but holding 1,776 inmates, six per 6m 2 cell.
Overcrowding in police lock-ups is more alarming
still. Human Rights Watch (1998) cites a newspaper
report of a lock-up in São Paulo where two prisoners
were held per metre. Remarkably, the lock-up was
holding 180 prisoners, yet had an official capacity of
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just 32. Similarly, Lemgruber (2005) describes
visiting a lock-up in Rio de Janeiro where 65 inmates
were being held in a dormitory measuring 12m 2.
United Nations Committee Against Torture (2009)
visited another lock-up in Rio de Janeiro that held 90
inmates per 30m2 dormitory, yet was officially
operating at no more than 200% capacity. As for
staffing levels, although the recorded prisoner:officer
ratio for June 2011 is not exceptionally high (for
example, 7.5:1 in São Paulo; 6.5:1 in Rio de Janeiro;
3.5:1 in Minas Gerais), in most states, guards work
24 hours on, 72 hours off, are often withdrawn to
perform clerical duties or to escort prisoners to court,
and are regularly absent altogether on sick leave
(Human Rights Watch (1998); cf. de Mattos (2010),
who conducted a survey of 100 prison officers in
Minas Gerais, a third of whom stated that they had
taken extended periods of time off work for health
reasons). Again, police lock-ups appear to be
disproportionately affected. Human Rights Watch
(1998) visited a lock-up in Rio Grande do Norte
where it found three officers responsible for 646
prisoners; on the day United Nations Committee
Against Torture (2009) visited the lock-up in Rio de
Janeiro, 1,405 prisoners were being guarded by six
officers. However, the problem is clearly endemic to

the prison system as a whole. The most extreme
example of staff shortage of which I am aware is a
penitentiary in Recife, Pernambuco, with a population
of 4,200 prisoners, at which Brazil, Chamber of
Deputies (2008) found five officers on duty.
Overcrowding and staff shortage are rightly
condemned in governmental and human rights
literature on prison conditions in Brazil alongside, for
instance, inadequate legal services (International Bar
Association 2010), sanitation and health care
(Human Rights Watch 1998). However, ostensible
human rights only tell half the story of what it is like
to be a Brazilian prisoner. Of equal importance, but
explored in less depth in the literature on prison
conditions, is the means by which prisoners and staff
adapt to material deprivations. Key to the day-to-day
struggle for survival in the impoverished Brazilian
prison system is inmate involvement in the day-to-
day running of the regimes in which they are
incarcerated. From my first-hand experiences,
conversations with Brazilian academics and prison
reform groups, and reading Brazilian anthropological
literature and prison biographies, I have formed the
view that largely as a result of such inmate
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participation, in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Minas
Gerais at least, Brazilian prisons continue to operate
with a semblance of normality.
Inmate Trusties and Prisoner Representatives
In the background to the depth of inmate
participation in Brazilian prisons is the wider issue of
collective prisoner activity. This relates, in part, to
the wide use of multi-occupancy accommodation and
limited use of lock-up, both of which encourage self-
governance, and, in part, to the volume of official
and unofficial prison work, in this case encouraging
prisoners to co-operate with prison staff. In the
prisons I have visited, inmates were allowed out of
their cells at 7 am or 8 am. The earliest they were
locked-up again was 4 pm (Bangu ll), and the latest
11 pm (Nova Lima). Cells typically open onto pátios
(courtyards or halls), where prisoners are able to
exercise, and receive their families for up to four
hours on dias de visita (visiting days), usually held
twice a week. A number of the pátios at Carandiru
were large enough for prisoners to play football. The
prison received 2–3,000 visitors each weekend
(Varella 1999), rising to up to 30,000 at Christmas
The Howard Journal Vol 52 No 3. July 2013 ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 272–284
time (Human Rights Watch 1998). At Polinter,
prisoners were confined to their dormitories from 6
pm, but held meetings and prayers as late as
midnight. Throughout the daytime and evening the
dormitories were filled with a constant murmur of
conversation. As for prison work, formal employment
is provided to one in four Brazilian prisoners, most of
whom are contracted by state or private companies
to work in prison workshops or (in the case of open
prisons) on the outside. Of particular importance for
current purposes, in the states with the lowest
staffing levels thousands of prisoners are also
employed as prison apoios (support staff).7 At
Carandiru, 1,000 prisoners worked for private
contractors (Varella 1999), and 1,700 for the prison
administration (Veja, 26 August 1998), as clerks,
cleaners or porters, or to provide services for officers
such as cooking, hairdressing, nursing and dentistry.
Eight hundred of these latter trustie inmates were
housed separately in pavilhão ll (block ll), the
pavilhão do trabalho (work block) or pavilhão da
banha (well-fed block), as it was nicknamed by other
inmates (Ramalho 1979). Each carried a pass
allowing him free movement across the prison
(Varella 1999). The remaining 700 worked in the
blocks in which they were detained. According to the
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June 2011 prison statistics, 15,665 prisoners
currently work as apoios in the penitentiary system
of São Paulo (9% of prisoners), but only 270 in Rio
de Janeiro (1% of prisoners). Importantly, official
figures do not cover all prison work, especially on the
wings, where prisoners often organise themselves to
make up for shortages of provision by prison
authorities. Nor do they cover every prison wing,
many of which are effectively controlled by prisoners.
This is particularly the case on the gang wings of Rio
de Janeiro, where prisoners are banned from
engaging with prison authorities. At Polinter, around
25 prisoners were formally employed in clerical or
janitorial work as colaboradores (collaborators)
outside the wings, but a similar number worked
informally in cleaning and meal-distribution teams on
the wings, on behalf of the coletivo (collective;
prisoner community) rather than the police. Further,
all prisoners participated in rotas for cleaning cells.
Under conditions of chronic staff shortage it is,
perhaps, inevitable that responsibility for much of
what goes on in Brazilian prisons passes to inmates.
In many prisons, inmates are involved not only in
maintaining, but managing, prisons and prisoners.
Though colloquially referred to as faxinas (derived

from the word faxineiras – cleaners), as already
indicated, inmates who participate in running
Brazilian prisons are involved in administrative as
well as in domestic work. More controversially, it is
not unusual for prisoners to perform duties usually
associated with guards. Again, this occurs both on
and off the wings, and among prisoners working
informally as well as those officially working as
trusties. Brazil, Chamber of Deputies (2008)
describes two prisons (in São Paulo and Pernambuco)
where inmates are entrusted to work as turnkeys,
locking and unlocking cells and manning entrances to
the wings. Such practices are systematic in the NGO
administered prisons of São Paulo and Belo Horizonte
(de Menezes and de Oliveira 2010; Macaulay 2005),
and the police lock-ups of Rio de Janeiro (Figueira
2010). At Nova Lima, prisoners are also in charge of
the front gate during the day. In addition to the 25
prisoners who worked as clerks or janitors at
Polinter, 20–25 worked as turnkeys. The duties of
these trustie, collaborating inmates included
handcuffing and escorting other prisoners to and
from the wings, strip-searching, checking food
parcels brought in by visitors and cells at the end of
the day, and patrolling the grounds at night. A
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further eleven prisoners were informally recognised
by the police as being responsible for running the
wings. These prisoner representantes
(representatives), as they were referred to, had
numerous welfare-orientated duties, including finding
beds for new prisoners8 and ensuring that cell-mates
shared food, medicines and toiletries brought in by
families, contributed to the caixinha (collection box)
following visits, and left behind everything but the
clothes they were wearing when they were released
or transferred. Money was used to buy collective
goods such as fans, televisions, cooking equipment
and cleaning products, to provide packs of toiletries
to new prisoners, and to pay bus fares on release. As
in other prisons and lock-ups in Rio de Janeiro
(Barbosa 2007), São Paulo (King 2008; Marques
2010), Minas Gerais (Vilela et al. 2008), Espirito
Santo (Junior, de Souza and de Albuquerque 2007),
Santa Catarina (Oldoni 2001), Bahia (Cabral and
Azevedo 2008) and other states across Brazil (Brazil,
Chamber of Deputies 2008; Human Rights Watch
1998; International Bar Association 2010), they were
also informally responsible for enforcing codes of
conduct. In an extensive study of prisoner
organisation at Carandiru, Ramalho (1979) identified
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five categories of inmate code: in-cell behaviour (for
instance, not touching others’ possessions, and
remaining quiet in the evening and silent at night),
commerce (most important, to pay/collect debts),
solidarity (in particular towards those working as
trusties, upon whom everyone depended for the
circulation of goods, and through whose engagement
with staff it was possible to gain benefits such as
access to lawyers), morality (how to conduct sexual
relations), and dealings with guards (fundamentally,
not to inform on another inmate unless their
activities were causing trouble for other prisoners,
such as increased cell inspections). A series of more
recent postgraduate studies in anthropology and
social science departments in universities in São
Paulo (especially Karina Biondi and Adalton Marques)
and Rio de Janeiro (Antônio Barbosa and Anderson
Castro e Silva) have highlighted the continuing
existence of inmate codes covering a diverse range of
activities from the use of bathrooms to the treatment
of visitors, use of drugs, and violence. However,
while enforced by prisoner representatives, such
norms of inmate conduct are better understood as
emerging from the realities of everyday prison life
than from inmate hierarchies. Here a number of
additional points need to be emphasised. First, most
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codes have established histories, and apply equally to
all prisoners. Prisoner representatives are more likely
to be selected for length of prison career than for
extent of gang affiliation, and owe their position to
the confidence of the coletivo as much as to other
prisoner representatives. Moreover, while prisoner
representatives brief new arrivals on what is
expected of them, alleged breaches of code are
usually settled among ordinary prisoners. For more
serious disputes, prisoner representatives may be
required to convene more formal debates, but again,
play only a limited role in how they are judged and
settled.
Finally, it is not only the fact that prisoners play an
active part in running Brazilian prisons that is
important, but also that inmate collaboration and
self-governance is accepted, even relied upon by
officers and prisoners alike. At Polinter, the director
and the head inmate trustie consulted with prisoner
representatives over important decisions, for
example visiting hours and transfers of troublesome
inmates. In interview, the director of the lock-up
emphasised that discipline on the wings was not his
responsibility. Unless someone was seriously injured
or prisoner representatives were unable to control a

particular inmate, he had no need to interfere.
Equally, particularly but not exclusively in better
administered prisons like Polinter, where the director
insisted that his workers regarded themselves as
officials rather than guards, staff and trusties,
including trustie guards, are able to get on with their
work without obstruction, even where it involves the
use of violence as a tool of discipline (Castro e Silva
2008). At Polinter, trusties were treated as staff as
well as prisoners. Doing your time at the lock-up
included accommodating those who worked there,
without whom prison routines and prison
management would not operate smoothly. As at
Carandiru, trusties were sometimes derogatorily
referred to as informers (caguetagem at Carandiru;
X9 at Polinter), but as much in irony as antipathy or
resentment. In interview upon interview I was given
the same explanation for the positive atmosphere at
the lock-up: that it was in everyone’s interest to
value one another, as people making the best of a
shared, brutal, experience.
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The Factionalising of the Faxina
We have seen that in Brazil, inmates participate in all
areas of prison life, and that in many prisons inmates
work alongside, or in place of, prison guards. We
have seen further that these arrangements are
premised more in accommodation than conflict
between and among inmates and staff. This inmate
governance is as much a defining feature of Brazilian
prison life as is inhumane living conditions. More
specifically, as Varella (1999) stresses, it is not
possible to comprehend the everyday running of
Brazilian prisons without understanding the role
played by the faxina.9 In recent years, the
significance of the faxina has increased further with
the emergence of self-proclaimed criminal facções
(factions), comandos (commands) or partidos
(political parties), foremost the Comando Vermelho
(Red Command – CV) in Rio de Janeiro and the
Primeiro Comando do Capital (First Command of the
Capital – PCC) in São Paulo. There is a wealth of
anthropological literature on the role such gangs play
in governing the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and São
Paulo, many of which have little or no police
presence. Less explored is that all the major gangs in
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Brazil started out and continue to be foremost
prisoner organisations. The CV was formed in the
1970s among common bank robbers initially held
alongside middle-class political prisoners at the (since
closed) penal colony, Cândido Mendez, Isla Grande.
One of its founding members, William da Silva Lima
(Lima 1991) describes how, likewise arrested under
emergency national security laws passed by the
military dictatorship, but rejected by the ‘elitist’
(p.48) revolutionaries, who demanded to be
accommodated separately, these inmates soon found
themselves locked up 231/2 hours a day, 4–5 to a cell,
and subjected to beatings from guards. Through a
combination of negotiation, legal action and hunger
strikes, the CV eventually succeeded in ending the
systematic use of violence and cellular confinement
at the prison; through uniting existing inmate
falanges (phalanxes; created by prison authorities
through grouping prisoners according to area of the
city they lived – a practice that continues today), it
also managed to radically reduce violence between
inmates. As the gang spread to prisons on the
mainland, it broadened its demands to basic welfare
needs such as access to blankets, toiletries, medical
care and legal representation, with varying degrees
of success. In the long term, however, the CV – and
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rival splinter groups such as the Terceiro Comando
(Third Command) and the Amigos dos Amigos
(Fiends of Friends) – lost much of its initial ‘Robin
Hood mystique’ (Perlman 2009, p.63) as it moved
into favelas, and, in time, began to de-democratise
neighbourhood associations, kill or exile community
leaders,10 and get involved in regulating other areas
of organised crime, chiefly drugs (cf. Castro e Silva
and Nougier 2010; Leeds 1996; Penglase 2009). In
Rio de Janeiro’s prisons, on the other hand, criminal
gangs have retained a relatively less-contentious
presence, where they continue to play a significant
role in mediating disputes and circumventing banal
violence (Barbosa 2007), as well as providing goods
and services to inmates and their families (Barbosa
2006). As most other penal establishments in the
state, in effect Polinter was acting as two prisons,
imposing strict separation between gang members
and non-gang members (all of whom were
designated security prisoners). There were no
discernible differences in the nature of prisoner
organisation on the two wings, either in terms of
inmate codes or hierarchy: as previously noted,
representatives were chosen among cell-mates,
among those with most experience of prison, and
inmates who did not settle down were transferred to

pre-trial units in the official prison system. What
differed was the overt nature of staff-inmate
relations, which were more sober on the gang wing,
where inmates were more likely to be handcuffed or
to hold their hands behind their backs outside the
wing, less involved in banter with trusties, and more
likely to be consulted by the director or the co-
ordinator of police lock-ups in the state, who visited
every few days.
The PCC has achieved even greater levels of
prisoner organisation in São Paulo. Formed at the
maximum-security prison, Centro de Rehabilitação
Penitenciária de Taubaté, in the aftermath of the
Carandiru massacre, it has subsumed the role of the
faxina and ‘factionalised’ (Biondi and Marques 2010,
p.40) or ‘colonised the rules of conviviality’ (Marques
2010, p.318) at all but a handful of prisons. As with
the CV in Rio de Janeiro, the emergence of the PCC
has resulted in increased levels of mutual support
among inmates, and a significant decline in violence,
the latter of which is largely attributed to inmates
being prohibited from using crack cocaine or carrying
weapons. According to official statistics, deaths
through inmate violence fell from one per 500
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prisoners in 1999 to one per 3,000 in 2006. The rise
of the PCC is also the most plausible explanation for
a parallel fall in homicide in the city (Feltran 2010;
Willis 2009), from 12,818 recorded cases in 1999 to
4,189 in 2011, less than ten homicides per 100,000
population (Veja, 27 January 2012), the rate used by
the World Health Authority to indicate an epidemic of
violence. In 2006, the PCC took the radical step of
requiring scores to be settled through debates
outside, as well as inside, prison (Paes Manso 2009).
Conclusion: Forced Reciprocity
The end result of low guard numbers and lax
surveillance is a power vacuum. Unsupervised and
undisciplined, prisoners in Brazil are left to govern
themselves. With the meagre guard presence in
many prisons, there is very little to prevent tougher,
stronger, richer and more well-connected inmates
from threatening, intimidating and sometimes
violently abusing their more vulnerable fellows.
(Human Rights Watch 1998, p.105)
We try to do everything to avoid confusion . . . to
maintain calm for everyone . . . There needs to be
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one person in charge . . . one person to talk for
everyone, for everyone to obey. (fieldwork interview,
head prisoner representative, security wing, Polinter,
14 September 2010)
We try to give them everything they need within
reason . . . In exchange they keep quiet, they do
their time . . . they give me discipline. (fieldwork
interview, director, Polinter, 17 September 2010)
I’m not obliged to do anything, am I brother?
(common prisoner, quoted in Paes Manso 2009,
p.227)
The shortcomings of the literature on Brazilian prison
conditions is exemplified by Human Rights Watch
(1998). Not only did the report make just brief
mention of prisoner involvement in janitorial work,
but it made no reference to the existence of inmate-
guards, nor to self-governance on the wings outside
the context of gang domination and prisoner-on-
prisoner abuse. The prevailing Hobbesian image of
Brazilian prisons as places of abandon, conflict and
extraordinary pain and violence, I would suggest, is
reductionist and dystopian, over-reliant on anecdotal
reports of individual incidences of violence, and
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premised in a lack of knowledge of the depth of
inmate participation in prison regimes and prison
management, and only partial understanding of the
nature of inmate/inmate-staff relations that have
arisen vis-à-vis staff shortage.
In this article I have sought to demonstrate that
we have as much to learn from prison ethnographies
and biographies as from literature on prison
conditions. Central to the accounts of many that have
been incarcerated, worked or researched in Brazilian
prisons, and to the findings of my own research at
Polinter, is the extent to which inmates’ lives are
shaped by the mundane realities of cohabitation,
employment and everyday survival as opposed to
material deprivation, domination and abuse of power.
During the three weeks that I spent at the lock-up it
became increasingly apparent that conflict was not in
anyone’s interest. Conflict between prisoners and
officers could only result in increased lockdown,
crackdowns, and reduced privileges for prisoners,
and more difficult working conditions for officers.
Conflict among prisoners could also bring reprisals
from officers, as well as damage to the authority
exercised by prisoner representatives, which depends
upon them demonstrating respect and humility

(Marques 2010) and working in symphony with the
needs of common prisoners (Barbosa 2007): an
arrangement in which inmate codes ultimately set
the day-to-day rhythm and prisoners do not feel
obliged to do anything that is not an established
norm (Biondi 2007). This is not to romanticise inmate
governance, nor to promote prison gangs; ideally,
the security and welfare of prisoners ought to be
guaranteed by the state. But neither should inmate
governance be regarded as inexorably organised or
hierarchal, and essentially a threat to the ordinary
prisoner. Contrary to its popular image, even a gang
as renowned as the CV is best considered a ‘co-
operative’ (Lima 1991, p.79) or ‘conjunct of alliances’
(Barbosa 2006, p.126) that rather than dictate,
provides a forum for dialogue between drug
traffickers and community organisations on the
outside and inmates and staff on the inside. The
historical figure of the faxina, not the gang leader,
continues to be key to understanding how Brazilian
prisons operate in the absence of guards, and the
power of the faxina continues to be tied to its ability
to provide for the coletivo and uphold its codes.
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Similar to analysis of community-gang relations in
favelas, I, therefore, propose that Brazilian prisons
should be foremost understood as structured places,
governed by inmates as much as by state officials,
but in the interests of prisoners as a whole rather
than in the interests of prisoner elites. Further,
violence should be regarded the exception rather
than the norm of Brazilian prison life, a state of
affairs that is brought about when relations between,
and among, prisoners and staff break down. More
specifically, inmate governance in Brazilian prisons
should be recognised as a system of forced
reciprocity between people living and working
together in poorly-resourced institutions, in
circumstances of acute material deprivation in which
relations between, and among, prisoners and staff
are likely to become characterised by mutual give
and take.
Notes
1 The numbers held in police custody are
underestimated in official prison statistics. The
figures provided for June 2011, for instance, do
not include data from four states. Nor do official
The Howard Journal Vol 52 No 3. July 2013 ISSN 0265-5527, pp. 272–284
statistics include many prisoners held in irregular 4 In the remand prison, inmates were being held up
detention (International Bar Association 2010). to 30 per twelve-bunk dormitory. On the day that
See note 2. I visited, the dormitories were even more
overcrowded than usual, as one of the wings had
2 Thousands of Brazilian prisoners are held illegally. temporarily closed following the discovery of a
The International Bar Association (2010) tunnel. Official prison statistics for the state of
describes a recent federal government initiative São Paulo can be found at http://
that led to the release of 16,466 prisoners held in www.sap.sp.gov.br (accessed 28 December
pre-trial custody, one in five cases examined. The 2012). The figures cited in this article were
initiative has since moved onto the wider prison recorded on 31 January 2012.
system. In total, 276,000 cases had been
analysed by June 2011, 11% of which had led to 5 This is a practice that exists in several other
prisoners being released (Estado de São Paulo, 20 states, including São Paulo and Minas Gerais
June 2011). Judges have also been criticised for (Human Rights Watch 1998).
excessive use of remand in custody. Lemgruber
and Fernandez (2011), for example, found that 6 I visited Polinter in late summer, when it was
only a third of pre-trial prisoners in Rio de Janeiro 30oC outside. One month earlier, journalists had
eventually receive custodial sentences. recorded a temperature of 56.7 oC, 20 degrees
higher than outside (O Globo, 11 February 2010).
3 The prison made headline news in 1992 when
military police used lethal force in response to a 7 Working prisoners gain one day of remission in
fight between two groups of inmate leaders in sentence for every three days worked. They are
one of its nine blocks. The official death count also entitled to 75% of the minimum salary
was 111. The majority were killed in their cells on (currently R$622, approximately £230, per
the (inmate leader-occupied) first floor by the month). However, this is another legal
notoriously violent special policing unit, ROTA.
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entitlement that prisoners are usually denied
(Brazil, Chamber of Deputies 2008).
8 At Carandiru, those who had the means to pay
were allocated comparatively spacious cells on
the middle floors. Those who could not pay were
moved into single cells on the upper floors, which
they would share with 5–10 others.
9 The word faxina is used as a general noun. In
Brazilian prisons it may be used both to signify
the act of cleaning, a group of cleaners, and a
group of inmates responsible for maintaining a
wing.
10 Note, however, that in the past few years the
facções, including the CV, have lost considerable
influence in favelas, as internal crack cocaine
markets have declined (Misse 2007), and as the
police have begun to aggressively retake control
of inner city favelas in time for the World Cup in
2014. In the first stages of a R$2bn (£800m)
programme, in which the city will gain an
additional 25,000 military police officers, over
200,000 people were ‘liberated’ between
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Wiley & Sons Ltd
The Howard Journal Vol 52 No 3. July 2013
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December 2008 and December 2010 (Veja, 26
January 2011), including inhabitants of the
Cidade de Deus [City of God] favela, whose
history of drug-related violence and conflict with
authorities was depicted in the internationally-
acclaimed film of the same name (Meirelle 2002).
Most recently, police took control of Rocinha, an
area of 100,000 inhabitants that had been under
gang control for 30 years (Veja Rio, 23 November
2011). More controversially, since December
2006, militia groups made up largely of police
moonlighting, have ‘invaded’ four in ten of the
city’s approximately 900 favelas (Folha de São
Paulo, 19 July 2011). These have proven just as
violent, corrupt and extortionate as the factions
(BBC Radio 4, 17 December 2009; Human Rights
Watch 2009).
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